Mira Fen's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

By the next morning the girl was already at her stand when Mira came in. Her hands moved faster than yesterday, folding, pinching, testing seams Mira had not yet shown her. Mira watched from her own bench and felt the room shift. The girl was learning past what a glance across the floor could teach. Soon she would press a seam wrong and not know it, and the small bright thing in her would dim. Mira set down her tool. The distance she had built so carefully would have to close, somehow, today. Mira stepped outside first. Against the workshop wall stood the tall shelf where the girl had been setting her finished tries — paper lanterns in every color, lopsided birds and crooked stars, lined up on each plank. Mira counted them. Twelve since yesterday. Too many, too fast. She touched one and felt a seam already splitting. She went back in and carried a wooden chair across the room. She set it down beside the girl's stand, close enough that their elbows could meet. The girl went still in that quiet way. Mira sat anyway and laid a small brass valve on the bench between them, the kind that fed flame into a sealed lantern. "This is next," Mira said. "I can't teach it from over there." The girl looked at the valve, then at the chair, then at Mira's burned fingers. She nodded once, small. Mira let out the breath she had been holding. The distance was closed. Now the harder work began.